I would someday like to write a pamphlet called “Left Wing Communism: A Personality Disorder.”

I find some of the intellectual content of the left communist milieu compelling, especially as filtered through some friends of mine, but in my experience of that milieu socially I find it less compelling. An older radical I met once said “all the Situationists I’ve ever known have been morose alcoholics.” That’s a bit unfair but it’s not *just* unfair. The Situationists shouldn’t be reduced to that emotional tenor, and I’m not here trying to reduce anything or anyone in that manner, but still, these emotional and social dynamics are real. That is to say, a lot of left communist ideas are worth taking seriously, but so is the fact that that milieu tends to be socially disfunctional, and the connection between the ideas and disfunctional character of the milieu is worth taking seriously as well.

To put it another way, there’s a left communist structure of feeling that’s problematic. As I wrote here, “Our traditions, organizations, milieus, networks… whatever it is we move and act within, they are as much a structure of feeling as they are a body of ideas. Particularly in terms of the elements that shape our actions.” As I wrote here,

The British marxist Raymond Williams wrote about what he called a “structure of feeling” made through a combination of people’s conscious efforts and unconscious activity. Williams used this concept to analyze common qualities in the everyday experiences of life in specific places and times. A structure of feeling is a set of outlooks, perceptions, and common impulses that people share. Structures of feeling tend to differ across different generations and groups of people. They are intimately bound up with the value system and world-view of a group and are often have as some of their core components imagery, metaphor, style, and narrative.

I think part of the left communist structure of feeling is a readiness to throw in the towel and move along, to retreat to more comfortable ‘critical’ positions, which means in part networks of people that involve primarily talking to people we already agree with in terms we all share rather than having to deal with the difficulties of lacking a common vocabulary and having to try to establish common values with people in order to move them toward our values. The theory provides a justification for that, and encourages the structure of feeling that’s ready to pick up and go. Part of what underlies all of this, though, is that emotional readiness to up and go, to unplug from relationships and from contexts. The relationships that are maintained are in part ones based on or tied to strong ideological agreement as much as or more than other forms of affinity.

Little of this seems conducive to the happiness of the people involved, as they often seem dour and abrasive (“morose alcoholics”) nor does it seem like it helps them accomplish much in the way of the goals they’d like to see. That self-defeating character is part of why I feel comfortable using the term ‘personality disorder’ though I mostly just meant it flippantly.

Inquiry is a collective social process, which requires conversations. In my experience a large part of the left communist set of conversational moves are moves that up the temperature in conversations. Often conversations get heated enough that they start to erode the social/relationship basis for conversation in the first place: they become self-undermining and inquiry seizes up.

Those interpersonal (anti!)social conversational habits are part of maintaining the tenor of the left communist structure of feeling, maintaining the propensity to say “fuck it, I’m out.” Another piece is a sense of futility.

In my experience, people are generally held back by fear or futility or both. I don’t think there’s any real correlation between political ideology and getting over fear and futility, I think it’s something else. I think a lot of left folk are sometimes an organized voice of futility when it comes to certain kinds of projects. To some extent the insurrectionary anarchist milieu is a voice against fear and futility to a limited extent — with their whole “ATTACK!” thing. I think this is a lot less a matter of theory than it is an expression of where they’re at otherwise,it’s a matter of their structure of feeling. To put it another way, I basically agree with Martin Glaberman that “action precedes consciousness”, which means in part that in any given moment the clear conscious ideological aspects and decisions people have made are only part of the total set of things going on in their actions. I think it’s really more like a process of action-then-consciousness-then-action-then-consciousness with tiny changes each time, and I think “consciousness” is at least as
much or more about gut level impulses and vague terms like right and wrong and fairness and justice (terms that are so vague that they’re almost meaningless in terms of their idea content but which still
express people’s deeply held emotional responses to their world).

In terms of people in the grip of fear and futility, I think they’re not going to be talked out of it via ideas alone — some cats just aren’t believers right now in terms of lived outlook/emotional orientation. They believe in future big stuff, and current big stuff far from them, but they’re not willing to plug away and deal with messiness. And the left communist ideology helps craft a story each time along the lines of “I knew it wouldn’t work out…” or “I should have known…”

Other notes:

As I’ve mentioned, I’d eventually like to try to write a sustained and serious piece on the philosophy of language and speech practices in left circles. I’ve talked about this a bit with regard to institutions of schooling and their effects on people: speech practices are real. They shape how people act and feel. They’re not the only shaping force but they’re one piece of the puzzle. This is one of the things I think is useful in Ranciere’s work on education. I think these dynamics are especially powerful, speech is especially powerful, when it’s a matter of stories people tell and stories people imply. Narratives and metaphors have power.

Part of what I like in Badiou’s work is his insistence on “keep going.” For me “keep going” means in part “maintain commitment.”

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yo yo! lenin in the house…wait, i mean, anti-left communism in the house but maybe from a left communist? alright. definitely worth pointing out, i also wonder about how this is part of or connected to the specific gender dynamics of such circles, and more than just, yes there is lots of men though that is the case too.

that said, i think that it is really important to not go from “keep going” to “popular front-ism”, that is, when we move campaigns, or organizations, or even within organizations, we need to have a clarity about our goals and aims, the politics of them, and a realistic assessment of how that can be possible. For instance, I was recently asked by a business union staff person to be part of planning a direct action collective where I live. This could be a useful project to connect across unions, to reach rank and file members with new ideas…or to have our skills and trainings sucked into an organization with a different view of direct action, the current situation, and with a firm grip on preventing independent growth of the group. both are possible, so at some level it is a question of energy and experience to judge from them, but unless i had something better to sink my teeth in i’d have jumped on it because at least it is something, right?

I really, really like your point about futility. I think there’s also a really interesting connection between left communism and primitivism. Lots of prominant left commies from the 70’s eventually went on to primitivism, folks like Wildcat UK, John Zerzan and Freddy Perlman. All of these groups had really good compelling libertarian marxist perspectives early on but also a very heavy sectarian “outside and against” perspective. I think a lot of the isolation, the desire the distinguish oneself intellectually by virtue of novelty over the radical pragmatism that organising forces you into, is negative trend that pushes a lot of good critically thinking radicals into a bad direction.

hey friends, thanks.
D, on “keep going” but not popular frontism, absolutely and well put. Another way to try to say this…
As you know, I like the phrases “Everyone wants a revolution but no one wants to wash the dishes.” Keep going is partly about “maintain willingness to wash dishes” though of course this too can get out of whack – there have been times in my life where politically I’ve felt a bit like I was up to my chin in dishwater.
I was at an event for a book some friends of mine did, the Team Colors people, and in the conversation afterward we got into a politics of joy. My response to that was to talk about being a parent with a young child. I am happy with my life as a parent, as you know, and there are moments of incredible joy and happiness and great silly fun. Those moments are not the majority moments, though. More often than not it’s things like changing diapers, chopping up food, cleaning up messes, reeling and working to keep cool because a flailing hand or foot caught me just right (or just wrong) in a sensitive spot, feeling tired… and as you know, I’m not able to be active in anything like the same way I used to be and I’m less engaged socially. Those sacrifices are well worth it, but they’re real ones. I talked about this and said that over all I do feel joy as a parent, it’s deeply fulfilling, but that if I was primarily motivated by joy I would be less happy as a parent and less good of a parent. For me, parenting is largely about and driven by commitment, and what I need as a parent is not just talk about joy but talk about emotional resiliency. I think the same is true for a lot of politics. I’m less interested in a politics of joy than I am a politics of emotional resilience (which would contain/involve joy as one element, and a real one to take seriously and talk frankly about, but only as one such element). I wrote a bit about some of this here – http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2010/11/16/could-we-use/ in connection with Disparaged CNA’s writings on her work in a care facility.
Getting back to the post at hand, “keep going” for me basically just is about that emotional resiliency. In my experience the structure of feeling (or the emotional habits encouraged) within left communism as a social milieu tend to be neither all that joyful nor particularly emotionally resilient when it comes to plugging away. I suppose that’s a lot of what I was trying to say in the post.
take care,
Nate

Saw this elsewhere and decided here was the best place to put a comment. I loved your piece. Really. What I find troubling is that your description of the milieu is dead on. Even if I live in a different country, with a different language and culture. Our ultra-left milieu, at least in Montreal and Quebec city really fit your description.

Phebus, thanks. It kind of sucks to be right about this though…! :) I hope all is well for you and yours.

Phinneas, thanks as well, and sorry your comment got caught in moderation, I dont know why that happened. I agree w/ you, and I’d like to know more of that history, any recommendations? One other thought I had, I wonder if there’s some connection between how the great-big-hopes and the cascade of disappointments are linked up for left communists… I mean, we all deal with this (or maybe this is just me having aspects of a left communist view) — everything is in some sense a defeat until the big win at the end. But I wonder if the really, really high bar of the final victory sometimes makes it hard to see any differences at all in what goes on before that, which in turn makes it hard to feel like one’s contributing to the big win, which in turn makes folk more bitter and morose… Know what I mean?

Interesting stuff, I should really read this blog more often. I found it fascinating how incredibly touchy people seemed to get in their responses on libcom. Finally, in defence of Wildcat, I’d stress that the majority of them never went primmo – I did a quick google for some background and there’s a discussion of it here: http://libcom.org/forums/history/wildcat (which then descends into a weird Kevin Keating argument, thus neatly bringing us back to the point about left communists and social skills…)

Thanks for this fantastic piece. It accords with a lot of my perceptions as well. I hold left communists in esteem mainly due to their positions on two matters of great importance to me: 1) Marx’s value theory and the communist project as the abolition of value and 2) a principled anti-nationalism.

But I maintain a certain distance from the milieu precisely for the reasons you enumerate.

A lot of lefties burn out, even ones involved in purely liberal reform efforts. One way to keep from burning out is to withdraw from active engagement for periods of time. How much time, depends on one’s own judgement. I’m 66 and have dropped out for from three years to a week or two at times of my radical life–class conscious since 1972. Of course, some people withdraw almost completely because of the ‘futility’ factor of it all and that may be because of not achieving universal goals within the space of time one has alloted for their realisation. Getting control or at least some control of the collective product of labour can seem a loser’s game, if one sees oneself in constant struggle with no result. BTW, I think this is why many ‘left-commies’ fall into cynical resignation, waiting for the Ice Man to Cometh. Yeah, Eugene O’Neil saw this syndrome, long, long ago. But he was a cynic himself and not one for embracing common ownership of the social product of labour. Beware the cynics of bourgeois ideological stamp.

Hey Nate, I think a good portion of what you were trying to convey got lost in the analogy with this. What I get out of this is that much of left communist politics is an intellectual response to an emotional problem ie frustration, disillusionment, alienation. While I think most folks in our milieu appreciate the critiques that left communist writings offer, when measured by their practical effects

“the desire the distinguish oneself intellectually by virtue of novelty over the radical pragmatism that organising forces you into…”

This. This really jumped at me, Mr. Gage. I agree so much. There’s this desire to be iconoclastic that seems part and parecl of some of the (emotional) stuff Nate writes about here. But also an arrogance and self-assuredness that turns me right off (and, ironically, seems incredibly ideological–in the sense of ideas having YOU). Drives me cray cray.